On 7/12/2011 23:57, Warp wrote:
> but in practice they have lost their status as separate independent
> letters.

I'm not surprised. I learned this in high school back in the early 70's. :-)

 > (Possibly the popularization of keyboards has helped this, although
> I think this trend started earlier.)

I don't think it's keyboards as much as it is collation by computers.

For example, it used to be that you'd sort Orwell's 1984 under the O's, 
because it starts with "One". Nowadays, libraries have a separate section 
for books that start with digits, because nobody wants to support 
traditional collation in a computer.

I suspect the same is true of Spanish. Who really wants to sort "ll" after 
"lz"?  Words starting with "ch" should come between "cg" and "ci", right?

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Coding without comments is like
    driving without turn signals."

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